#DimblebyLecture: DotEveryone and the new logical order

"DOT EVERYONE must help us navigate the multiple ethical and moral issues that the internet is presenting and will continue to present", Martha Lane Fox told us in the Dimbleby Lecture last week, 30 March 2015.

She was thinking of problems like mass surveillance by the security services, she said. And children's on-line rights. The implications of wearable technology and the Internet of Things. "Smart cities" and robots. And cybercrime.

She gave no hint what the solutions to those problems might look like, except to say that they would embed our national values – British values – in the digital world: "That, for me, would be DOT EVERYONE’s third big task – help us embed our national values in the digital world".

You might think that no progress can be made by DotEveryone before those problems have been solved.

Wrong.

Six months ago on 14 October 2014 the Guardian newspaper published Online voting should be made mandatory, says Martha Lane Fox. Can the security of on-line voting be guaranteed? Would the outcome of elections be determined by the voters or by the best hackers? Should voting be mandatory? Can you strip non-voters of their citizenship or their right to benefits?

DotEveryone can't answer those questions. It can't tell the digital world where British values would embed the solutions. But that doesn't stop DotEveryone from legislating for on-line, compulsory voting. This is a new logical order. Either you get it or you get out: "Of course we can cover for all the fraud and I don’t think it makes the procedure any less robust, in fact quite the opposite".

The Open Rights Group, incidentally, and the University of Michigan have thought about this matter as well and, "quite the opposite", they think that eVoting is "less robust".

In the same Guardian article, Martha Lane Fox says that people should have the right to delete everything from the web which might suggest a misspent youth: “We should be able to create these safe places for kids to be OK and for it not be okay for that to then come back to haunt you at a later date ... That feels quite urgent and important and manageable”.

She also says that people shouldn't have that right: "somebody might want to go into politics but hasn't announced it yet and might want to take off everything about their lives previously, there might have been some kind of terrible corruption in the past".

A contradiction?

No.

Not a bit of it, not with new added British values, not in the new logical order of DotEveryone.

#DimblebyLecture: DotEveryone and the new logical order

"DOT EVERYONE must help us navigate the multiple ethical and moral issues that the internet is presenting and will continue to present", Martha Lane Fox told us in the Dimbleby Lecture last week, 30 March 2015.

She was thinking of problems like mass surveillance by the security services, she said. And children's on-line rights. The implications of wearable technology and the Internet of Things. "Smart cities" and robots. And cybercrime.

She gave no hint what the solutions to those problems might look like, except to say that they would embed our national values – British values – in the digital world: "That, for me, would be DOT EVERYONE’s third big task – help us embed our national values in the digital world".

You might think that no progress can be made by DotEveryone before those problems have been solved.

Wrong.

#DimblebyLecture: down with sash windows

Suppose that Nigel Farage said:

It is within our reach for Britain to leapfrog every nation in the world and become the most digital, most connected, most skilled, most informed on the planet ... Britain grabbed the industrial revolution by the throat – we became the powerhouse of the world – and we can do that again.

He would be accused of dog-whistling. Opprobrium would be heaped on his head from all bien-pensants quarters for appealing to that aggressive nationalism for which the British empire will forever be infamous and the only proper response to which is abjectly to acknowledge our guilt.

But then Mr Farage is the leader of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, a youngish political party which campaigns against the UK's membership of the European Union and in favour of traditional Conservative values. He is not Martha Lane Fox, the person who actually uttered those words last Monday 30 March 2015 when she delivered the BBC's annual Dimbleby Lecture, only to be greeted by proud and benign smiles from all the great and the good in the audience.

Suppose you said the same thing. "It is within our reach ...", etc ... You wouldn't get to say it in the Dimbleby Lecture and the great and the good wouldn't be there to smile. You wouldn't even get the opprobrium – you don't matter that much.

On the other hand, you might get some useful criticism. Britain can't leapfrog every nation in the world. Britain is one of the nations in the world and it can't leapfrog itself.

And if you went on to say ...

A new institution could be the catalyst we need to shape the world we want to live in and Britain’s role in that world ... It would be an independent organisation that is given its power by government but has a strong mandate from the public.

... as Martha Lane Fox did, you might be asked if perhaps you weren't over-reaching yourself. What kind of institution can shape the world and Britain's rôle in it while at the same time being backed by the government but controlled by the public?

This is no normal public body [you can say that again] ... It’s time to balance the world of dot com, so I would call it DOT EVERYONE.

Always supposing that it was possible to create this world-dominating institution, DotEveryone, why would we want to? Apparently, if only we became more digitally adept ...

... it would not only be good for our economy, but it would be good for our culture, our people, our health and our happiness.

That, of course, could be the stated objective of any political ideology. Including UKIP's. And the BBC's. If the Archbishop of Canterbury claimed the same benefits for adherence to our new go-ahead Church of England a plague of contumely would rain down on Lambeth Palace for 40 days.

Not so Martha Lane Fox, even when she explained that the distinctive appeal of DotEveryone is that it would see the end of mahogany desks, sash windows, three-piece suits and men with grey hair:

It’s 1998. I am 25. I am sitting in a huge central London office, with long sash windows, and a grey haired man in a three piece suit is at the far end, behind a big mahogany desk.

1998 is 17 years ago. Now:

76% of Britons use the internet every day. Our nation of shopkeepers is now home to the most enthusiastic online shoppers on the planet. In 2014, e-commerce accounted for about 15% of total UK retail sales ... A report from Tech City in February this year found that there are now 1.4 million people in the UK employed in digital businesses and venture capital. The sector is 20 times what it was just five years ago ...That makes it bigger than health or education or construction.

It looks as though the internet is getting on famously without DotEveryone. But no, progress isn't fast enough for some fundamentalists ...

We just need to go much, much faster and we need to make sure all of us are included ... There are currently 10 million adults in the UK who cannot get the basic benefits of being online ...

...and it's all the fault of our ignorant politicians, public officials, business leaders and journalists. In fact, men in general:

DOT EVERYONE our new organisation, must figure out how to put women at the heart of the technology sector. That alone could make us the most digitally successful country on the planet and give us a real edge.

Why has women's lib been fighting for so long? So that women can code in Java. (The programming language. Not the place.) The fight is still not won. How will DotEveryone succeed? Give money to unemployed women, obviously:

Why not launch a national challenge to find the best ideas to tackle this problem? ... Why not offer every unemployed woman free education and training? ... Surely there must be a couple of new Ada Lovelaces lurking in this land?

If poor old Natalie Bennett, leader of the UK's Green Party, had suggested that, "poor woman, she can't be expected to understand", the commentators would have said, but Martha Lane Fox was still being listened to seriously.

DotEveryone has other tricky problems to solve before we climb the hill to "the inspiring, brave new world ahead". Martha Lane Fox mentions mass surveillance by the security forces services. The protection of minors on-line. The implications of wearable technology and the Internet of Things. The public good v. private profit. Cybercrime.

And her proposed solutions? She doesn't have any. All she can say is:

That, for me, would be DOT EVERYONE’s third big task – help us embed our national values in the digital world ... It will make sure the UK fills the moral and ethical gap that exists at the heart of discussions about the internet.

This Dimbleby Lecture contributes yet another gap to discussions about the internet.

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Updated 6.4.15

The following comment was submitted to the Martha Lane Fox blog and awaits moderation:

dmossesq says: Your comment is awaiting moderation. April 5, 2015 at 10:58 am What have you got against sash windows? Reply

#DimblebyLecture: down with sash windows

Suppose that Nigel Farage said:

It is within our reach for Britain to leapfrog every nation in the world and become the most digital, most connected, most skilled, most informed on the planet ... Britain grabbed the industrial revolution by the throat – we became the powerhouse of the world – and we can do that again.

He would be accused of dog-whistling. Opprobrium would be heaped on his head from all bien-pensants quarters for appealing to that aggressive nationalism for which the British empire will forever be infamous and the only proper response to which is abjectly to acknowledge our guilt.

But then Mr Farage is the leader of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, a youngish political party which campaigns against the UK's membership of the European Union and in favour of traditional Conservative values. He is not Martha Lane Fox, the person who actually uttered those words last Monday 30 March 2015 when she delivered the BBC's annual Dimbleby Lecture, only to be greeted by proud and benign smiles from all the great and the good in the audience.

The system is fine. It's the users that don't work

Online farm payment system abandoned after

'performance problems'

It has fallen to Bryan Glick, the estimable editor of Computer Weekly, to perform the first post mortem on the Rural Payments Agency's (RPA) computerised Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) which was discontinued yesterday and replaced with paper – "successive software releases failed to resolve the problems with the mapping tool".

We have known for two years that Mr Mike Bracken, the executive director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), was heavily involved in the development of BPS. "I'm on the Board", as he told us, "I'm trying to help them every week ... GDS will be working very closely with them ... it's going to help us deal with Europe in a different way, and quite rightly we're building it as a platform. It's going to be another example of government as a platform".

Mr Glick reveals that in addition, Mr Liam Maxwell, the Government's Chief Technology Officer is also the senior responsible owner of BPS, "overseeing progress", and that this is a mark of "the importance of RPA to the GDS strategy".

These are highly respected people:

• Mr Bracken came top of the Digital Leaders 50 poll in November 2013.
• One month later, Mr Maxwell came top of the ComputerWeekly UKtech50 poll.
• In January 2014 the US GovFresh Awards named Mr Bracken "Public Servant of the Year".
• By June 2014, the Digital Leaders 50 had doubled to the Digital Leaders 100 and Mr Bracken came top of the Central Government Official category.
• In October 2014 the Chief Digital Officer Club named Mr Bracken "Chief Digital Officer of the Year".
• And then in December 2014, three months ago, Computer Weekly ranked Messrs Bracken and Maxwell the fifth and fourth most influential people in UK IT, respectively.

Highly respected, but it doesn't seem to have helped with BPS.

Perhaps the cheerleaders who voted for Messrs Bracken and Maxwell should have looked harder at that GDS strategy, which was heavily criticised at the time by at least four professors:

• The professors deemed the strategy to be too flimsy, the detail was missing, it was going to be of no practical assistance to a large local authority or, as it turns out, to RPA.
• The strategy underestimated the complexity of ultra-large-scale government systems, it ignored the relevant academic studies that might have helped GDS to understand the "complex cultural, political and regulatory environment" in which the "technologically diverse, long-lived set of transactional services" of government have to operate.
• Against that, the appeal to open source, agile, the cloud and SMEs is "over-simplistic", the professors said. "There are risks that rapidly changing [agile] services will deter the takeup of digital services, not encourage it" and "the [Government Digital Strategy] is remarkably (perhaps alarmingly) silent on the issue of how to coordinate SMEs in project delivery":
• Both of those problems have been experienced by BPS according to Mr Glick. "The iterative development process was also causing problems for farmers. “The system is frequently going down at short notice for upgrades, making it difficult for farmers and agents ...".  One of the suppliers is a "Belfast company that uses offshore developers in Gdansk, Poland", there are "hundreds of IT experts" also involved and more than 100 products that need to be integrated.
• "We see little discussion of a concrete and practical change management process to support the 'digital by default' strategy", the professors said, back in January 2013. Two years later, that is clearly still a problem.

And what does Mr Glick say?

... the complex guidelines for the new Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) runs to 84 pages ... the situation differed considerably from the days of SPS [the predecessor system].

Clearly we're not dealing with anything "ultra-large-scale" here. That can't be the problem. Nor can the considerably different situation – there are still only 84 pages and the RPA have had at least two years and £154 million to work on BPS with the assistance of GDS's agile expertise.

"Scalability of the system had already been identified as one of the biggest challenges", according to Mr Glick:

GDS chief Mike Bracken acknowledged the complexity involved in a blog post in December 2014. “It’s not just the policy that’s complex. For this exemplar alone, we’re talking about roughly 110,000 farmers and 1,200 land agents,” he wrote.

By no stretch of the imagination is 112,200 111,200 people a large user base, 84 pages do not make for a complex policy – wait till GDS see the 15,000 pages of our tax code – and if the problem of scalability had been identified why did anyone inflict the system on the poor unfortunate users, particularly GDS, who claim to put the user uniquely first?

Mr Bracken is further quoted as saying:

Farmers themselves are a diverse group of people, whose properties can range from a smallholding to an industrial-scale business. The average age of farmers in the UK is also quite high, with many in their 60s and 70s.

Is Mr Glick complaining or being asked to complain that farmers aren't standard enough? And that they're too old, damn them? And too stupid: "There must have been question marks around how less digitally literate farmers would cope"? And even worse, that they live in the countryside?

Broadband access in remote rural areas was another issue, said ... a report in Farmers Guardian.

The system is fine? It's the users who don't work?

GDS will be working very closely with them ...
It's going to be another example of government as a platform ...

The system is fine. It's the users that don't work

Online farm payment system abandoned after

'performance problems'

It has fallen to Bryan Glick, the estimable editor of Computer Weekly, to perform the first post mortem on the Rural Payments Agency's (RPA) computerised Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) which was discontinued yesterday and replaced with paper – "successive software releases failed to resolve the problems with the mapping tool".

Agile@DEFRA

Just another government IT failure, BBC news website:

Online farm payment system abandoned after 'performance problems' A multi-million pound government IT system to process EU subsidy payments for farmers has been largely abandoned following "performance problems". The system will be re-launched next week with farmers asked to submit Basic Payment Scheme claims on paper forms. Farmers say they have struggled with the £154m website for months ...

Or is it?

Perhaps this government IT failure is special.

DMossEsq's millions of readers will remember that the Government Digital Service (GDS) used to entertain us once a week with their Friday Message. Here's an extract from their message of 11 January 2013, an interview with Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO, executive director of GDS and senior responsible owner of the non-existent identity assurance programme:

Interviewer: Looking back at the end of 2012, what do you think about? PSotY: I think about delivery. I think it was a brilliant year, and it was capped off in fine style by the publication of the departmental digital strategies. I think getting those departments to make that ambition statement was a tremendous achievement, because it gives us our next step of our mandate. Martha gave us our publishing mandate, and we've now got our transaction mandate. It's going to be fantastic. Now we can get on with the job of delivering major transformation right across the government's estate: tax, land management, justice, all those departments, all the great stuff to come. Interviewer: You've just recently come back from Reading... PSotY: I have. I go weekly now. I go to the meeting of the Common Agricultural Policy Reform Group. It's the RPA. It's the Rural Payments Agency. Why I'm so excited about that is because they've embraced agile completely. They're going with an agile build out of a whole new programme. That's going to affect everyone in this country, and how they deal with land management, all the farmers, all the people who deal with crops, all the data. It's going to create, I think, a data industry around some of that data. It's going to help us deal with Europe in a different way, and quite rightly we're building it as a platform. It's going to be another example of government as a platform. I'm on the Board, and I'm trying to help them every week, and GDS will be working very closely with them to deliver that. I've already seen a prototype. We're going to be showing that soon. It's really, really exciting. It was created so quickly, such a small amount of money compared to some of the big IT programmes that have preceded it. It's just a new way of working, and RPA have really embraced the whole spirit, as well as the whole emphasis behind the digital strategies.

No wonder he didn't mention DEFRA in his Guardian article earlier this week, Firms still have time to adapt to the digital age – but they're cutting it fine, in which he lectures the ignorant on GDS's putative agile successes.

... they've embraced agile completely ...

Agile@DEFRA

Just another government IT failure, BBC news website:

Online farm payment system abandoned after 'performance problems' A multi-million pound government IT system to process EU subsidy payments for farmers has been largely abandoned following "performance problems". The system will be re-launched next week with farmers asked to submit Basic Payment Scheme claims on paper forms. Farmers say they have struggled with the £154m website for months ...

Or is it?

Budget travel to Estonia

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered his 2015 Budget report yesterday.

The media have clocked all the good jokes, please see for example How George Osborne's Budget jokes cost Britain £81m.

A selection of press release jokes issued by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills some time ago without anyone laughing:

• 1.11.12 More than £1 billion to be invested in UK science and research
• 5.11.12 New powers for courts to improve justice for wronged consumers
• 6.11.12 Government to care homes sector: help us improve enforcement of regulation
• 8.11.12 Fallon to big businesses: Commit to paying suppliers on time, or be named
• 8.11.12 Use of Civil Sanctions Powers Contained in the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act 2008
• 9.11.12 UK space industry set to rocket with £240 million of investment
• 9.11.12 Government to invest £20 million in synthetic biology
• 13.11.12 Mums and dads will share parental leave
• 14.11.12 Business Secretary’s statement on European Commission’s proposed directive on improving gender balance on Europe’s corporate boards
• 15.11.12 Business Minister hails North East Regional Growth Fund success
• 16.11.12 Business Minister announces £40 million boost for high growth SMEs
• 17.11.12 New power to boost consumers’ access to data
• 20.11.12 £150 million for businesses to build skilled workforce
• 21.11.12 £400 million boost to England’s colleges
• 21.11.12 UK secures £1.2 billion package of space investment
• 22.11.12 Government sets out steps to change culture in UK equity markets
• 23.11.12 Bureaucracy busting boost for street traders
• 23.11.12 Emerging technologies to drive growth identified
• 26.11.12 Multi-million pound boost for UK manufacturing supply chains
• 28.11.12 Green bank opens for business
• 28.11 12 Lord Currie sets out vision for new Competition and Markets Authority
• 30.11.12 Business Secretary urges headhunters to seek out new female talent
• 3.12.12 Boost for UK automotive supply chains
• 4.12.12 Groceries Adjudicator to have new power to fine supermarkets
• 6.12.12 Vince Cable launches schemes for skills and jobs on South Coast
• 6.12.12 New £550m capital investment programme will transform FE colleges

All po-faced, they say: "While Tory MPs cheered a series of one-liners aimed at Ed Miliband and Labour, taxpayers will be covering the bills". Taxpayers cover the bills whenever politicians open their mouths. Yesterday's announcements were no different.

And while they were busy being all reproving, the Puritan press missed the bad jokes, see particularly p.27:

1.76 Budget 2015 announces that the digital ambition will extend beyond central government and arms-length bodies, to consider local services. HM Treasury, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Government Digital Service will collaborate with partners in local government, as the sector develops a set of proposals that will enable more customer-focussed, digitally-enabled and efficient local services in time to inform future budget allocations. 1.77 In this Parliament the government has delivered significant savings from centralising the procurement of goods and services. Budget 2015 announces that, following a successful trial, the government will implement ‘GOV.UK Verify’ – a new way for people to prove their identity online when using government services – across central government. This means that departments will use the same tool for their digital services, reducing duplication. Further, to prevent individual departments paying different amounts to either build their own data centres or outsource this service, the government will create a joint venture to host departments’ non-cloud based servers, which could save up to £100 million.

And p.37:

1.108 Building on these foundations, Budget 2015 announces that the government will transform the tax system over the next Parliament by introducing digital tax accounts, removing the need for annual tax returns. By the end of the next Parliament over 50 million individuals and small businesses will be able to see and manage their tax affairs online.

We have noted this government's green ink fascination with Estonia before, please see for example Francis Maude seeks future in Estonia and RIP IDA – The Road to Estonia.

Estonia provides all or most of its public services on-line. So we are to have digital-by-default in the UK.

Estonia only needs one website. So we are to have one website in the UK for all of central government and for all of our 450 or so local authorities (para.1.76 above), never mind the fact that the entire population of Estonia is little bigger than the London Borough of Ealing.

Estonia relies on issuing everyone with a central government ID. So we are to have GOV.UK Verify (RIP) in the UK (para.1.77 above):

The UK should be more Estonian

Estonians can complete their tax returns in 19 seconds. So we are to have digital tax accounts (para.1.108 above) in the UK:



There will be all sorts of promises about the security of these systems. You can't put them in the bank but never mind, the Chancellor must have his little joke, let's go all the way, Tallinn here we come, for "Estonia", read "the UK": Estonia hit by 'Moscow cyber war'.

Budget travel to Estonia

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered his 2015 Budget report yesterday.

The media have clocked all the good jokes, please see for example How George Osborne's Budget jokes cost Britain £81m.